Visa The Tech Company; Lego Tells Stories

Speaking to Ad Age, Visa CMO Antonio Lucio said the company fancies itself a tech firm, and it plans to back that fact by hiring 500 engineers in Austin, Texas, this year. Visa spends 46% of its ad budget on digital media, but Lucio estimates that figure will surpass 50% by the end of the year. “Most people don’t see Visa as a technology company,” Lucio told Ad Age. “Our vision is to make sure more developers can use Visa to generate the next generation of mobile payments.” In fact, Visa will put a portion of its digital spend towards a spot in next year’s Super Bowl to showcase its idea of “frictionless payment” in Levi’s Stadium.

Lego Brand, Media Corp.

As Visa turns to tech, the brand infamous for wrecking parents’ feet is turning to content. Wait, what? “We used to be a toy manufacturer. Now we're turning more and more into a media company to tell our story about these bricks. We need a lot of content to tell that story,” said Lego VP of Marketing Conny Kalcher, speaking at the Global Marketer Conference in Marrakech. Lego’s shift from paid to owned media is a data-driven endeavor, with new real-time media centers informing content and campaign creation. “For us it's just as important to stimulate the conversation between one consumer and another rather than just leading the conversation,” he added. The Drum has more.

Efficiency, You’re A Jewel

Nuanced targeting and data mining drives audience engagement, but it did more than that for jewelry company Ritani. Last year, AOL began buying TV ads for Ritani on about a dozen national cable networks through Adapt.tv. The campaign coupled Ritani’s proprietary data with data from AOL and third-party providers like Axciom, boosting sales. “The whole point of this is, there is way too much waste on TV,” said Mark Keeney, Ritani’s VP of marketing “We’re a startup. We have to be focused on efficiency. And this allows for precision.” More via the WSJ.

Dazed By Data

Brands are struggling to apply their data to improve consumer experiences, according to research from Econsultancy and tag management firm Ensighten. While 96% of brands recognize the importance of the consumer experience, 62% are overwhelmed by the volume of data they’re managing and 85% say they can’t derive the full value of the data they obtain. “Marketing organizations continue to struggle with large data and technology silos, as well as with shortage of talent to overcome them," commented Boaz Ronkin, Ensighten’s SVP of product. "To maximize the return on investment in their marketing technology stacks, CMOs must look for integrated solutions that excel at joining disparate systems, rather than add new standalone systems into the mix." BizReport has more.

Programmatic Hookup

Following Telstra subsidiary Ooyala’s acquisition of European video SSP Videoplaza last fall, the company is priming for a US push. As part of that effort, Videoplaza CEO Sorosh Tavakoli was named SVP of ad tech for Ooyala and will relocate to NYC. And the company has forged a premium programmatic marketplace with video demand-side platform TubeMogul. “We’re entering a world where everyone’s frenemies,” Tavakoli told AdExchanger, adding that platforms like Facebook and Google, and cable companies like Comcast, are all competing to serve premium publishers in some capacity. “We’re coming at this as an enterprise, ad-serving and SSP technology platform built for premium publishers.” Press release.